Cain

I was a bit too hard on Saramago in my post about his novel Blindness. I think in hindsight that I was just never able to really embrace the story itself, and used Saramago's run-on-sentence-heavy quotation-mark-less style as a scapegoat for my displeasure. Knowing Sweeney was a big fan of the Portuguese author, and knowing that my tastes and Sweeney's don't usually differ so drastically, I decided to give Saramago another shot. Cain, a quick little story mostly about all the unspeakable horrors wrought by God in the Old Testament, and also the late Saramago's final novel, seemed like a perfect reentry point. And it was. While I still struggled at times to understand, for instance, which characters were speaking which sentences during several scenes of dialogue, I wasn't nearly as lost or confused as I was in Blindness. Perhaps the use of familiar Bible characters and stories helped with the clarity, or maybe Blindness - in which all of the characters are blind - was just going to be hazy regardless of grammatical stylings. Either way, while I really didn't enjoy Blindness, I have to say I was thoroughly entertained and amused by Cain. The premise is pretty simple. In the Bible, after Cain kills his younger brother Abel, God banishes him to spend his life as a "restless wanderer." This is the last time Cain is mentioned in the holy book itself, way back in the fourth chapter of Genesis. Saramago decides to get a little creative and have Cain's "restless wandering" bring him all over the map witnessing all of the vengeful fury and havoc God wreaks on mankind, from the destruction of the Tower of Babel to the utter ruin of Job to the massacre of all the men, women, and children in cities at war with Israel to Abraham being told to murder his own son to prove his love to God. The callous and cruel depiction of God reminded me at least a little bit of Joseph Heller's God Knows, but here it was much more curt, cutting deeper and more sharply while simultaneously being far more blunt. (Mixed metaphors!) The God in God Knows was humanlike, subject to mood swings and imperfect logic; the God in Cain is just kind of a straight up dick. Cain's travels include abrupt shifts in time between eras, which added a very Slaughterhouse-Five-ish feel to the story. This flexible temporal continuity also allows the book to end with Noah's ark, something that happens really early on in the Bible, and unquestionably God's most aggressive act in the Bible, in which the world is flooded and all men, save for Noah and his family, are drowned. Now, it's here at the ending where the book became "pretty good" instead of just an often darkly funny but largely pointless trip through the devastation of the Old Testament; I won't spoil anything specific, but let's just say that up until this point Saramago has not taken any creative liberties to ultimately change or redirect the course of biblical history, and he certainly does so here. At any rate, I'm glad I read another Saramago book and I'll likely read a few more before I'm done. Sween, any recommendations?